Imagine cruising in the Caribbean on a sweltering autumn day…

Too hot?

Time to slide along the decks to the Happy Hour in the ice bar where you can join the penguins, polar bears and walruses for a cool bevy or three.

And to crunch some iced peanuts most of which you can’t quite pick up off the frozen counter without the aid of a pair of mittens.

The thing to remember about cruise ship bars is this: many are cold, but few are frozen.

Inspired by Scandinavia’s ice bars and ice hotels the cruise industry’s first true ice bar – on the Norwegian Cruise Line’s ship, Epic – is the ultimate place to chill.

A blast from the mast

A frozen chamber that simulates the Northern Lights, sort-of, it boasts a giant glowing ice cube centrepiece that changes colours while a pulsating techno beat provides the underlining energy of this Arctic-like nightclub on deck seven.

You’ll need some thermals, a fur coat, gloves and a hat over your swimwear if you want to recline or sit here for the bar, walls, tables, stools, glasses and life-size sculptures are all made from ice.

Or you can huddle with the other 24 passengers, which is all that can be shoe-horned into this floating boozy igloo between 5 and 12pm where the temperature does not rise above 17 degrees Fahrenheit – for a cover charge that includes a couple of vodka cocktails, shaken, not stirred.

If, like that drink’s famous discerning fan, James Bond, you’re British, you’ll feel right at home.

For this is a cruise ship hostelry with a difference where, as Samuel Johnson once said, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.’

Cold cruising

Or downright bloody freezing.

Oscar Wilde put it more pithily, ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else.’

This last statement especially applies to the cruise ship industry’s usual ageing predatory female cougars who are given to draping themselves over prospective mates, looking rather like Mrs Slocombe of Are You Being Served?, who once complained, ‘ What about the fog? My pussy’s been gasping all night.’

Not that the fog, smog or a teeming blizzard would put off any passengers looking for an unusual evening on the ice-tiles, for this is a lounge which gets half lit to match its patrons.

It’s a good place to observe that there is some truth in that hoary old chestnut: a cocktail is a drink with ice imbibed by people who don’t like to eat on an empty stomach.

Maybe that’s why I always ask for extra olives in my Martinis. Although I’m not sure it does much for my Atkins diet.

But I kind of agree with that dear old curmudgeon, W.C. Fields, who once muttered to nobody in particular, ‘I gargle with whiskey several times a day – and I haven’t had a cold in years.’

By the way, if a woman sneezes in an ice bar, she’s catching cold; if she yawns, she’s getting cold. The trick, if you’re single and fancy free, is to note the difference.

However, if you yawn, maybe you should change your partner, or the ice cubes in your drink.

Monkeying around on a ship

Talking of being bored by crass behaviour, I was sitting in a cruise ship cocktail bar, one time, staring at a young, unkempt, ugly, rude, loud-mouthed son of a bitch who was annoying the other patrons and the bartender.

Then he slid off his stool and, bristling, stamped up to me on his knuckles and grunted, ‘Who the hell do you think you’re looking at?’

I replied, icily, quietly grasping behind my back the deadly iced banana I keep handy for such inauspicious occasions, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. But you see about forty years ago I made love to a stunted water buffalo and I was wondering if you were my love child.’

The brute noted my icy demeanour, blinked, scratched his chin and armpits, shook his furry snout, shuddered and – thank God – stalked off to clamber up the ship’s funnel for a swing round the crow’s nest.

I then asked the bartender for something tall, cool and full of gin. He sent over his wife.

James Leavey

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